Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both...

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his...

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world’s greatest events are not produced, they happen.

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a...

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up…

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down...

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.

People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it...

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul...

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don’t we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other...

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not...

Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.

If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was...

The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

Man loves company – even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the...

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be...

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one’s own advantage and to that of one’s craft that a large part of genius consists.